To Feel Stuff (4 page)

People who come here for the first time always say, “There's something charming about this place. It's like a manor.” They look at the tall wooden doors, the big brass knobs on those doors, all the old windows. They walk into the marble entryway and gaze up at the crown moldings. They admire the high ceilings.

I always knew the school was in on it, this deliberate beautification of sickness.

Have you noticed the women behind the service window work under crystal chandeliers that give out dinnerparty light? It's like all the incoming patients should expect to be handed sourdough rolls instead of forms that ask, “Do you smoke? Do you have unprotected sex? Who should we notify in case of emergency?” Visitors just look at the winding staircase like “Christmas garlands!”

Then there's the warmth that you've internalized by now. Your body probably runs a few degrees warmer than it did when you first came here.

I left the top of the staircase and roamed this floor. I went down to the waiting room and looked at some HIV, depression, and exercise pamphlets just for the hell of it. I went to the blood closet and opened and shut some cabinets. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself.

I went to the pharmacy and tried to pick the lock with a needle from the blood closet, to see if they'd gotten any new promotional notepads or pill cases from the drug companies. I was unable to break in. I have no future in burglary.

After I tried ten seconds of barefoot tap dancing, there was nothing to do but go back to the infirmary. I stood in the doorway looking at my two pillows, the way that they'retained the shape of my skull because they'd been under my head for so long. It was the same with the down pad covering my mattress. In the places where my blanket was kicked back, I could also see myself in the pad Sarah bought for me at the mall because the coils in the bed had been bruising my back and thighs. I used to wake up every morning feeling like my ass had been kicked. Now it's just some mornings.

I looked at my metal frame and what I had now begun to consider “my planks” on “my floor.”

I've always felt that the infirmary looks a lot like a nursery, but maybe that's just because I've felt so babied in it. Maybe it's also those filmy gauze curtains over the windows that I want to burn.

I walked over to the fireplace. You know how visitors still insist on that weird habit of rubbing their hands in front of it, even though it hasn't been lit for years. A doctor from downstairs had just come the day before and dropped a pile of magazines on the mantel because he'd been cleaning out his basement. He patted the pile and said, “There's some good reading in there.”

He must not have looked through the pile before he dropped it off because I found a few copies of
Hustler
and
Black Tail
in between the
National Geographies
and
Newsweeks
.

That night I looked through the girlie mags and generally preferred them, since the pictures I liked best were the ones where a subject looked directly into the camera, regardless of who the subject was. In the
Newsweeks
especially, the people often looked away like they wanted to pretend the camera wasn't even there.

Outside, the sirens were whooping and your voices were crying out, but the hollowness of the building was closer and louder. I felt like something delicate alone in a vault. Then I went to take a shower, so at least I'd be cushioned by white noise.

The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004

 

When I got to the hospital, Wainscott was finishing up with E. She had acquired yet another illness for her résumé, but it was her newfound desire to confide in me that drew me there.

E seemed agitated in a way that I had never witnessed before. I found her behind one of the curtains in the emergency room, twirling a cotton swab between her fingers, her bare legs dangling over the edge of the bed (she was dressed in a customary hospital gown). As soon as she saw me, she pointed the swab at me and asked, “Are you a good doctor?”

“You're asking me this now?” I questioned. “We've been working together over a year.”

“I know, but I didn't care before,” she said.

I had known that E hadn't been particularly interested in the details of my study, but I'd chalked up her lack of curiosity to denial. It seemed to me that if she became invested in my work, it would mean taking on an almost overwhelming immersion in her health problems. I'd believed E was keeping herself from depression only by creating a mental wall separating her from the reality of her situation.

As it turned out, I discovered in the hospital that E's indifference was the result of her having very low expectations of me.

“I'm an excellent doctor,” I told her.

E laid the swab down on the table next to her bed as if it were a sword she'd used to get the truth out of me and, now that she'd achieved her purpose, no longer needed. “Will you help me figure out what's wrong with me?” she asked.

“What do you think I've been doing?” Even though I'm childless, in that moment I knew what it was like to have an ungrateful child.

“This is something new.”

“I know. Wainscott told me over the phone,” I reminded her.

“No. Something happened last night. You're the first to hear about it.”

I sat down.

E had taken a shower the night before, and she began to describe the details of the showering experience to me, including her attempts “to keep the battered side of my face away from the nozzle.” She'd hit the side of her face on the windowsill after experiencing an earlier wave of dizziness. As she related this to me, I realized that this was the first time E was talking freely and at length in my presence.

She told me everything she could remember, saying that she needed me to have every available piece of information for my inquiry. She told me that for the past six months, she'd been having the nurse practitioners buy her travelsized soaps, shampoos, and conditioners at the drugstore. This was so, according to E, she “could feel like at least one aspect of my life is in a state of flux.” Although there were only a handful of travel-sized brands to try, as long as the products ran out on a weekly basis, they delivered the impression of change. Because E never used any one item long enough to become accustomed to its particular properties, she was constantly aware of its unique smell on her skin and hair, and this made her seem “slightly vibrant” to herself.

E told me that the previous night, she had used Salon Selectives shampoo, and while I didn't see how this detail could possibly affect my diagnosis, I listened without comment. She seemed to want to talk, and I certainly wasn't going to stop her. “It smells fruity,” E informed me. “Like apple candy that doesn't smell like a real apple, but is recognized by people as an apple smell anyway.”

E had been working shampoo into her scalp when she noticed a flash of movement between the edge of the plastic curtain and the shower wall. She thought she'd seen a finger brush the rim of the sink.

“Hello?” she called out.

“I'm convinced,” a masculine voice answered her.

None of the nurse practitioners were males, and E had been the infirmary's only patient for two weeks at that time. “This was a stranger in the bathroom,” she told me.

E had ducked her head out of the spray of the nozzle so she could hear better. The water was too loud on the tiles for her to gauge how close the stranger was to her, and he made no shadow against the white curtain.

“What are you convinced of?” E had asked, wanting to get him to talk again. She described her wet skin to me as “tingling,” and I asked her if she thought this extrasensitivity in her nerve endings was an early symptom of her Raynaud's diagnosis. She replied that she thought it was simple “heat and fear.”

“That you had to be sick in order to see me,” the stranger had replied.

He was directly on the other side of the curtain, his voice muffled by the mist around her. E had leaned forward to peer through the space between the curtain and the wall to see if she “had enough room to run or if I should fling myself out of the shower and attack. Then I'd have the element of surprise on my side.”

All that E could make out was the stranger's hand resting on the faucet. She observed that the hand had a bizarre consistency, as though it were made out of mist. She wondered if the steam from the shower was playing games with her vision because from where she stood, “it looked like the hand of a ghost.”

Suddenly, the hand drew away from the faucet, and E, scared that the stranger was on the move, decided the time had come to throw aside the shower curtain and pounce.

She clenched her right fist and held up her left hand with her index finger extended, ready to “jab it into an eye.” With her left leg she kicked aside the edge of the curtain, only to reveal an empty bathroom. The door remained shut—she had closed it behind her—and her towel, folded on the tile in front of the sink, was still neatly placed there.

E, nude, walked to the door and opened it, peering into the infirmary. She told me that all of the shadows were the familiar ones, that everything appeared calm and empty.
E remembered subsequently being overcome with the uncanny quality of the encounter, and only becoming aware of herself again when she realized that a dollop of shampoo was still in her squeezed palm, “dripping between the cracks of my fingers onto the floor.”

This was where E's story ended. She waited for my first question. I could tell that I was in dangerous territory, that her future trust and confidence depended on my response to her experience and the light in which I chose to see it. This was a moment filled with the potential to win her over or alienate her forever.

I asked, “What do you want me to say? Why did you even come to me with this?” I felt it best to appear slightly exasperated with her, so that she would be forced to reveal her hand. I'd make her educate me, fill in the blanks, because I was fearful that if I offered a wrong opinion, she would never offer me the chance to correct myself. This was our showdown, and I believed that if I displayed any weakness at this juncture, she'd shoot me and leave town, so to speak.

When E finally blinked, I knew we'd pushed through to the other side. “Because I need you to weed out all possible medical causes for me.”

“E,” I said, “if you think there was someone in the bathroom with you last night, then you're probably right. Call the police or tell Vivian.”

“We need to do tests, and you need to be thorough,” she said.

“I'd be happy to run them,” I told her, “but, please consider, if you think there was someone—”

“I don't think there was
someone
in there with me!”
E shouted at me. This was a day of firsts: her first phone call to me, her first request for my help, and the first time I heard her raise her voice.

Stunned by her outburst, I said, “Well, let's start by running a CAT scan.”

With the help of Wainscott, we ran all the tests that we could that day. We did the CAT scan, and then, when that showed nothing, followed it up with an MRI to confirm that there was no tumor in E's brain. E reported that she hadn't had any recent morning headaches, vomiting, exceptional lack of coordination, or any other symptoms that might accompany a tumor, so I told her that I felt we could safely dismiss that possibility.

Jokingly, I told her, “Well, you have had a sudden change in personality, so maybe we shouldn't be so hasty.”

She looked at me in a quizzical way, not getting my joke, and asked, “What do you mean? How do I seem different?” She seemed unusually worried about this. Her reaction struck me as interesting, since she had never before seemed concerned what I or anyone else thought of her.

“You're being friendly with me,” I said.

“Oh,” E replied, patting me gently on the shoulder.

To exclude the possibility that E was embarking upon another course of encephalitis, we did an EEG and, covering all our bases, a tomographic scan to rule out a cerebral hematoma. Test after test came back normal. Once we had worked our way through the more insidious options, I examined E for signs of ordinary flu, infection, and allergy, anything that could possibly cause her to hallucinate. We examined the possibility of drug interactions with no luck.
A hospital psychologist interviewed E for signs of psychosis. By the time we were finished, I was certain that, while E still had persistent traces of her current illnesses that we already knew about (including her latest Raynaud's phenomenon prognosis from Wainscott), there was nothing physical impairing her brain.

The sun was starting to set, and I told E that I'd give her a ride back to the infirmary. She was getting dressed behind the curtain. After a period of silence in which I debated whether or not I should push even farther, I finally decided to ask, “Is it possible that someone's stalking you?”

“What are you talking about?” E asked.

“It seems as if there's something very personal about what happened to you last night.” I wanted her to know that I was on her side no matter what, as I felt a new bond being constructed between us. “I believe you. Whatever it is, I believe you.”

E appeared from behind the curtain, dressed in jeans and a sweater. She looked so exhausted from the tests that I motioned to a passing nurse for a wheelchair. “You know how I said that the stranger's hand was see-through, like a ghost's?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I think I've started seeing ghosts,” she told me.

I was trapped. I had told her that no matter what she believed, I would believe it, too, and I knew that showing any skepticism about her confession would corrupt the ground that we had broken that day. So, while I may have chosen to be less honest with E at first, my lie forced me to continue the deception until, ultimately, I discovered it was no longer needed.